***RULE CHANGES***

[RTGRuss]

Hi Guys,

 

There has been an issue developing lately in one game with terror attacks - tactics involving one or more nations making repeated terror attacks that drive down a target nations' morale so fast that there isn't much that can be done to stop it. The system has always allowed for these tactics but until recently they were not used to any great extent so the problem never really presented itself. Looking at the system now I can see that with these tactics being fully utilized and even refined that it will be far too easy to drive down morale in and far too difficult to defend against. This would have rapidly spread to all games.

 

The key point, of course, is the Force Peace order. Once the morale goes negative a FP order can come in and really hamstring an opponent - taking away his ability to fight back and driving him even further negative so that getting out of the predicament is extremely difficult. Without change I’m afraid the game will evolve into nothing more than a race to see who can drive morale negative the fastest – with all other considerations falling by the wayside.

 

As much as I hate to make changes in ongoing games I think the best option at this point is to change the combat routines so that all terror attacks will no longer affect national morale. Any air (SB/TRS) or naval (CB) mission where population was a primary or collateral damage target can still be issued as normal and everything will work as before - it just won't generate any national morale loss for the target nation. The damage that would have gone to population will be wasted now so SB/CB missions with the Population target key should be avoided - the damage results would just be the collateral damage so it's more efficient to use any other target key.

 

Initially my thought was to simply remove the Force Peace (FP) order from the game completely since it was a key factor but several players pointed out that the loss of the FP threat would lead to out of control spending (i.e. nations would declare as many wars as possible before out of control spending drove their morale negative and with no FP to consider the spending would never stop). Hoping to find a better way I went back to the code and came up with this change instead.

 

This will remove the threat posed by the massive use of terror attacks while leaving the Force Peace concept in the game (so that there are still consequences for negative morale). I considered a morale loss per cycle idea but it would have been a far more complex coding problem and, with archaic code, I wanted to find something relatively simple that I was confident I could do without causing other problems in the game. Reduced morale loss was an option too but without a cycle loss cap I was afraid it wouldn't solve the issue.

 

I had already made a code change to prevent neutral positions from using the Force Peace (FP) order and I thought that I might as well leave that in. Neutral positions don't do it often (they often have morale problems of their own) so I don't think it will be a big change regardless but I think it's probably a change for the better.

 

Thanks to everyone for their input and patience during this whole process. I know that it hasn't been fun for any of us but I hope the end result is a workable solution that keeps Victory! running until we have Victory! II ready (still a ways to go but we are making progress).

 

Best of luck to everyone and thanks again for gaming with us!

 

Russ